Online Reporter
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
LAST month, as hundreds made the great trek to Nkayi for Imiklomelo kaDakamela, everything seemed perfectly planned.
This event had been a long time coming.
For a year, people had quietly digested the events of the last edition of the ceremony held in the heart of Nkayi and as they ruminated on the past, they slowly started planning for the future.
Tailors had been commissioned, outfits prepared and accommodation secured.
When it all came together, it was a breathtakingly beautiful sight.
Far from an ordinary award ceremony, this year’s Imiklomelo was an explosion of fashion, culture, business and everything else in between.
It all seemed to have been planned immaculately, right down to the last stitch on every guest’s garment.
Yet, the man at the centre of this cultural melting pot, Nkayi’s Chief Mbusi Dakamela, does not believe that all the excellence on offer was part of some grand design.
“I would love to take credit and claim that this was all part of a grand plan that I had when we started this, but that is not true. We have just allowed things to happen naturally and what has followed has surpassed even our own expectations.”
Yet, despite Chief Dakamela’s protests, there is a quiet but unmistakable shift rippling across Zimbabwe.
It is a renaissance, a return, not to the past, but to something deeper.
It is a reclamation or some might say a re-imagination of tradition and culture in a new Zimbabwe.
At the centre of it all stands a generation once dismissed as too distracted, too globalised, too detached to carry the weight of heritage, but which is instead redefining it.
From the corridors of chieftaincy in Matabeleland North to the runways of contemporary African fashion and the intimate spaces of the kitchen, young Zimbabweans are not merely preserving culture but are reshaping it, breathing new life into traditions that once seemed on the brink of fading into memory.
In Matabeleland North, Chief Dakamela has emerged as a compelling figurehead of this cultural renaissance.
Young, introspective and quietly radical in his approach, he has challenged long-held assumptions about the capacity of a new generation of traditional leaders.
“When I started work on this concept, I was surrounded by older people,” he told Sunday Life.
“Whenever I addressed a meeting, there would not be a person younger or the same age as I am in that gathering. I would always chide them by saying that they would pass away and leave me on this earth.
“I did this jokingly, of course, but I needed to impress upon them the fact that I wanted to see their children in the meetings because it was clear to me that it was the older generation that had a sense of belonging to our community.
“So, I could forecast that in 10 or 20 years, we would have a problem because where would the young people have learnt an appreciation of their own home?”
The absence of young people at meetings where the idea of Imiklomelo was born and refined, troubled Chief Dakamela.
Regardless of the reservations of the elders around him, he was determined to draw young people towards tradition and culture.
For Dakamela, the problem was not that young people had rejected their roots. It was that culture had failed to meet them where they were.
“In those early days, I realised that you cannot call the younger generation to meetings. They need something that will intrigue them, something that will draw them towards their culture and community. We have to catch their attention with a movement that they can join and be proud of,” he said.
What has followed is a fluid, organic, and deliberately undefined movement.
Through platforms like Imiklomelo and cultural showcases such as Miss 2K, Umahlekisa, Amagugu and imbube performances, Dakamela has embraced what he calls the “reciprocity principle”.
His presence at such events has made him, in the eyes of many, one of the coolest traditional leaders within the country’s borders.
“I believe that people mirror what you give them. However, I think support for our initiative goes beyond this. There is something natural about the way that people have gravitated towards Imiklomelo because even if you support people, it does not always mean that they will give you that same level of support.
“We are culturising the modern, but in doing that, we really did not expect this kind of response from people. There is something deeper that is driving the support for this initiative. I would like to pretend as if I know why the support has been overwhelming, but only the people can tell you why they support it so much.”
Chief Dakamela said that he believes it is this openness that has allowed the movement to grow beyond its origins.
As it grows even further, he said he is determined to continue doing things off the cuff, allowing the movement to grow organically.
“In most cases, I prefer not to read speeches because I hate scripts. I have seen people doing project planning, saying things should happen this way and this way. However, when we are doing that, we are only repeating what we have seen.
“You are only repeating what other people have done or failed to do and you are just improving on their mistakes. We just want to drive this thing and see where it goes. If we try to define it, we might kill what makes it attractive to so many people in the first place. We are guided by a few core principles, but this thing is bigger than all of us,” he said.
Around Chief Dakamela, a constellation of young creatives and thinkers has begun to form, each interpreting culture through their own lens.
Together, these voices form a chorus that is reshaping Zimbabwe’s cultural narrative.
They are not rejecting modernity, nor are they blindly preserving the past. For Prince Sivalo Mahlangu, that lens is food.
In an interview with Sunday Life, Mahlangu said that food is a medium often overlooked in discussions of heritage, yet perhaps the most intimate expression of it.
“Food is an important, in capital letters, important cultural expression. It is something people consume daily. The plate becomes like a mirror of our society,” he said.
Through his culinary initiative, Magriza Made Me Cook, Mahlangu is reintroducing Zimbabweans to the deeper meanings embedded in what they eat and why they eat it.
“I think in recent history, our people started to associate tradition with primitivity and backwardness. But what did royalty eat? And how does that apply today?” he said.
For Mahlangu, the answer lies in connecting past practices to present realities and in doing so, restoring dignity to traditions once dismissed.
That same philosophy finds expression in the work of fashion designer Zana Kay, whose brand, A Tribe Called Zimbabwe, has become synonymous with a new style rooted in tradition, yet unmistakably contemporary.
“This is not about the next thing, the cool thing or the trendy thing,” she said of her work.
“It is about lasting things. Preserving memories passed through generations. Honouring legacy. Reclaiming identity. Bring back fashion that is not just cool. Bring back fashion that recognises who I am… something my great grandmother would smile to see me in,” she said.
